Here is a picture of the UV Map for my head. which I shall be using as a guide for painting.

I will be working in a texture size of 3000 by 3000.

If your just learning and practicing you do not really need to go this big, a texture size of 1000 by 1000 or 1500 by 1500 will be just fine there's just no need putting in extra detail when its not needed.

I'm using texture size of 3000 because of one that's probably the limit of the memory I have for my PC also I plan to do some large renders of the head and 3000 by 3000 should be fine.

Now I'm not really, going to go into great detail of what each map does, please read the above texturing links by Leigh she can explain them far better then i can.

Some of these maps I just use as part of my shader, please remember you don't actually need to make all these maps, this is just what I use. I will be starting with the bump map because its usually the base for the other maps, now if your have Graphics tablet your probably find adding nice bump details far easier, then using a mouse. I only have a mouse so it's not so easy painting nice bump details and can take a lot of time, but we'll make it;-).

Now lets load up photoshop and make a start. This tutorial is aimed at beginners so the bump map won't actually involve too much painting.

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I've thought up a few ways to make it easier to make a bump map, it won't be the best, but it should be quite easy to make and follow if you have Maya that is.

Lets first load the UV map into photoshop.

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I've made a gray 50% gray layer, below the uv map layer.

Now i've screened the uv map over the gray layer and turned down the opacity.

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I should just say you always need good reference for making textures, here is the picture i'm using for reference, i'm not going for a nice clean skin texture, quite the opposite.

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Now usually I would start painting the bump details and it can be hard some times to make a start. But for this tutorial I'll be using some of Maya's Procedural textures as a base for our bump layer.

So let's load up maya and experiment with some of maya's Procedural textures, it's always good to experiment and try different things.

Now using the IPR Interactive renderer, i've played about with different textures and settings looking for different parts of the skin.

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I've pluged a fractal texture and started playing about with the settings.

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I've tweaked the settings till I found something that I liked, once I'm happy I converted it to a file texture that I can use in photoshop.

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From the menu shown above I first selected the head mesh then shift selected the shader, then select convert to file texture from the menu.

Here's the options i've selected texture size 3000 by 3000 because that's what i'm using of course and I selected TIFF format to keep all the details.

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Once Maya has written the texture image i open it in photoshop and paste into my photoshop file. Now let's see what else we can use...
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